Scorpion in the Sea

by P. T. Deutermann

  “It has happened, Cap’n.”

  “Yeah, OK, tell the guys it’s either an ASW or a gunnery inspection—we’re not sure which. Tell ’em we’ll do some practice firing on the sea trial. That’ll do it. Those gunners mates love to shoot those things. And in the meantime, make sure the plant gets fixed, all the paperwork gets done, everybody gets paid, you know—the little shit.”

  The Exec stood up and put away his little notebook, into which he had copied the Captain’s latest instructions.

  “Piece a cake,” he said airily. “Piece a cake.”

  “You’re bragging again, XO.”

  “Hackers never brag; we just chop it up and get it done. And, by the way, you’ll need to change into whites for the reception tonight.”

  Mike abruptly sat forward in his chair. “What fucking reception?!”

  “Group Twelve hosting the Chambers of Commerce from Jax Beach, Neptune Beach, and Ponte Vedra at the Club. All CO’s inport command performance. CO’s only, no XO’s. You’re gonna love it, Cap’n.”

  Mike closed his eyes and began to count to ten. The Exec wisely fled.

  FORTY-NINE

  The Mayport Officers Club, Friday, 2 May; 1830

  Mike arrived at the Officers Club ten minutes after the reception began. He joined a stream of officers in tropical whites and civilians in business suits at the front door, and passed through the reception line a few minutes later. Admiral Walker and Mrs. Walker were receiving; Captain Martinson, and the base Commander, Captain Johnson, were the other senior officers in the receiving line. Mike could see the Commodore across the room, talking to two other CO’s. The civilians passed through the line and then congregated in small, uncomfortable looking knots around the main reception room until one or more naval officers made their approach.

  As soon as Mike saw the Chief of Staff, he looked for Diane, but was surprised to see that she was not there. The Admiral said hello pleasantly enough, as did Mrs. Walker, and then they both turned to the trio of businessmen right behind Mike. Stepping to the right, he said good evening to the Chief of Staff. Captain Martinson was aloof, as usual.

  “Good evening, Captain. How’s the plant coming along?”

  “Slowly, but surely, Chief of Staff. We’re welding on top of welds at this juncture.”

  “Yes, well that’s the price we pay for keeping antiques around.” He dismissed Mike by turning to greet the civilians next in line.

  And I hope someday soon to show you what the antique can do, thought Mike as he headed for the corner bar. He got a beer while wondering fleetingly where Diane was. The Commodore saw him and signalled him over as the room filled up with more civilians. Soon he was part of the process of making the luminaries of the Chambers of Commerce feel at home in the Club. After a while, the Admiral, his wife, and the Chief of Staff began a tour of the room, joining each conversation group for a few minutes. When they arrived at the Commodore’s group, Mike listened to the pleasantries for a few minutes, and then felt an urge to ask the Chief of Staff where Mrs. Martinson was this evening.

  “I actually don’t know,” admitted the Chief of Staff. “She left me a note saying she might drive down to Orlando to see some friends. By the way, thank you very much for rescuing her the other day at NAS Jax. That was most kind.” Martinson sounded unusually human for a change, Mike thought. Look out. A tentative thought about where Diane might really be began to form in his mind.

  “No problem, Captain. For a while there, I thought your Volvo was going to be totally submerged.”

  “It might as well have been, although fortunately the engine compartment apparently didn’t go under. There’s still a faint whiff of wet sawgrass inside, though.”

  The Chief of Staff turned further away from the group of civilians.

  “Tell me something: where really did that crazy idea about Libyans come from?”

  Mike looked around to see if the civilians or anyone else were listening before answering.

  “It was and is a wild guess, Chief of Staff,” Mike sighed. “It’s not hard to make a case either for or against it. But the Admiral has quashed it, and so that’s that.”

  “Yes, well of course he had to. We’d all look like flaming idiots if we surfaced a notion like that at headquarters in Norfolk, remarkably imaginative though it was. You need to understand that we’re under a great deal of pressure these days on such issues as operating funds, days-at-sea money, you know—the budget wars. The Admiral invests a lot of his personal prestige on claiming our fair share down here in the toolies. A report like this right now would hurt everybody. Now, I could see how one might think there was something out there, although it’s all pretty thin gruel in the cold light of day. But making the leap to Libyans, as it were, was just a bit much. I mean, really, Colonel Khadafi has been threatening to attack western surface shipping for years, like the QE II threat a few years ago; and yet he’s never once actually sailed a submarine for more than three days. Jane’s Fighting Ships says that his boats are not really operational.”

  Mike hid his surprise. The Chief of Staff may have been dismissing the whole idea out of hand, but he had consulted the world standard reference.

  “Yes, Sir, but a Foxtrot class could certainly go that distance and stay out on patrol for a long time, if they wanted to do it. The German diesel boats went all the way around Africa and out into the Indian Ocean during the Second World War.”

  “Yes, yes, everyone knows that. But I just can’t see it, for two reasons: one, I can’t see the Arabs ever getting that organized, and, second, if he made such an attack he risks war with the United States of America, which gains him nothing but destruction.”

  “Yes, Sir, if you could prove that he did it. You’d have to catch the submarine, physically, and even take some prisoners; otherwise, he could just deny it. As things stand, we won’t even have any grounds for making the accusation if in fact the Coral Sea is attacked.”

  The Chief of Staff appeared to think about this for a moment, and then the Admiral began to move on to the next group. Martinson gave Mike a brief, strange look, and hurried to join the Admiral. The Commodore broke up the conversation group by making a refill maneuver to the bar, and then he caught Mike’s eye. They moved over to a window away from the crowd.

  “What was all that about, Michael?”

  “He thanked me for rescuing his wife from the drainage ditches over at NAS, and then we got on to the submarine thing.”

  “Oh, yeah? What’d he have to say?”

  “How ridiculous and unlikely and improbable, etc. But he apparently thought enough about it at one time to go look up Khadafi’s sub force in Jane’s.”

  “Hmmm,” grunted the Commodore. “I wonder if they really have dismissed it, or if they have someone working it on the Q.T.”

  “If they do, what are the chances of your Q.T. running into their Q.T.?”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. Or he could be thinking about how to cover his ass if trouble materializes. By the way, my intel guy has asked the question, but it’s Friday, so we won’t get any feedback until Monday. He couldn’t exactly go in with fire bells ringing.”

  “Yes, Sir, I appreciate that. The XO and I have started planning on two fronts.” He went on to describe the work planned for the weekend.

  “Good move,” said the Commodore, eyeing some new civilians who were making their approach. “Let’s plan to meet Monday night. And good evening, gentlemen, I’m Captain Aronson, ComDesRon Twelve, and this is Captain Montgomery, CO of the Goldsborough. How do you do?”

  Introductions were made all around, and one of the civilians, whose name tag said he was President of the Jacksonville Beach Seafood Restaurant Association, asked Mike if Goldsborough was the ship that found the sunken fishing boat.

  “Yes, we did, or rather we found the oil slick and the Coast Guard actually found the Rosie III on the bottom. It was a sad discovery—I knew Chris Mayfield.”

  “So did I. He used to come to our meeting some
times. His sister—do you know her, too? She gave me a call the other day, said the fishermen are pretty upset. There’s lots of talk going around about some kind of submarine out there. The fishing people still think the Rosie wasn’t an accident.”

  “Well, it’s just most unlikely,” the Commodore interjected before Mike could answer. “It just doesn’t figure that a submarine would be hiding out in our fishing grounds taking shots at commercial fishing boats, does it.”

  “Well that one fella is insisting that he saw a submarine out there, and that it looked like one of those old U-boats. He says he’s been told the Navy doesn’t have any subs that look like that, and so it must be a foreigner. He’s saying the Navy’s covering something up.”

  The others began to listen in interest.

  “There’s nothing to cover up, I’m afraid,” replied the Commodore, patiently. Mike kept his eyes on the carpet, letting the Commodore carry the water.

  “If we were covering something up, we’d have never reported finding the Rosie’s oil slick, would we? Anyway, the Coast Guard is investigating the Rosie III sinking. They’ll probably pinpoint something that’s going to make all this submarine talk sound pretty foolish. Captain Montgomery lives out there in Mayport, and knows several of the commercial fishermen, don’t you, Mike. Some of those guys hit the bottle pretty hard, from what I’ve heard.”

  He laughed to take the sting out of his insinuation, and most of the group laughed along with him, but the one man would not let it go.

  “I think maybe you’all are making a little light of this thing, Captain,” he said defiantly. “There’s some people’s upset out there in the Mayport community.”

  “I can appreciate that,” said the Commodore, with a hint of exasperation in his voice. “We get upset when we lose a plane or have an accident aboard one of our ships. But the Navy is not allowed to get into the Coast Guard’s business, and the loss of the Rosie III, if not an accident, is a law enforcement matter. All this talk of a submarine makes for interesting bar talk, but there’s simply nothing to it. Now, Sir, tell me about your Association.”

  The conversation moved on to other things. An hour later, Mike managed to extricate himself from the reception and the O’Club, and headed for the Lucky Bag. He found himself driving faster than usual, in anticipation of finding Diane at the boat. But when he arrived, only Hooker was present for duty.

  “Well, Bird, where the hell is she?” he asked, stripping off his uniform whites in the cool of the lounge.

  Hooker declined to answer, and went into a whistling jag instead. Mike promptly dropped the cover over the cage; he hated it when Hooker started in on one of his random collection of melodic fragments, as the noise tended to go on for hours. He shifted into boat clothes and went down to the fishing piers to scrounge a fish for dinner. Later that night he was reading in the lounge when the Exec called.

  “Sorry to bother you, Sir, but the CDO called me a few minutes ago,” said Farmer.

  “What’s up?”

  “The quarterdeck got a call from a woman who would not identify herself, but who insisted on having your home phone. The OOD wouldn’t give it out, and referred her to the CDO; he also refused to give it to her; he did get her number, it’s long distance by the way, and then called me.”

  “No idea who this is?”

  “No, Sir. But the OOD said she acted like she was somebody important; she apparently got kinda pissed off at the end of the whole deal.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser; maybe she’s pretty—lemme have the number.”

  The Exec gave it to him, noting that it was the south Florida area code. Mike said he’d give her a call and see what it was all about. Sometimes irate divorced wives called the Captain to find out why sailor John wasn’t paying his child support. He dialled the number.

  “Hello? This is Mary,” was the reply at the other end.

  “This is Commander Mike Montgomery calling,” Mike began. “Someone called—”

  “Oh, yes, hang on a second.” He could hear the woman calling someone. She sounded excited. Then the sound of Diane’s voice came on the line. Mike had forgotten all about Martinson’s comment.

  “You’ve got a pretty effective screen on that quarterdeck, Captain,” she said, mock exasperation in her voice.

  “Yeah, well they have their instructions. CO’s get a lot of strange calls.”

  “How about obscene calls, Captain?” said Diane, her voice coy.

  “Not as many of those as I’d like, I’m afraid, Ma’am. Where the hell are you, anyway?”

  “Do you miss me?”

  “Well, I’ll survive, but Hooker’s gone on a whistling jag; he might be pining. Wants to see a little leg, I think.”

  She laughed, a delightful, throaty sound over the phones.

  “I’d forgotten the houseboat number. I’m in Orlando with Mary Jackson; she’s now officially an accomplice. She caught her husband playing around two years ago, divorced him, and now is in advertising at Disney World. We’ve been friends since Washington, five years ago. I told J.W. I was coming down here for the weekend to visit.”

  “And just how does that solve Hooker’s problem?”

  “Well, here’s the plan—I’m calling J.W. tonight from here, and I’m going to let Mary say hello. I’ll tell him that tomorrow we’re going shopping all day, just to spoil his weekend, only I’ll drive back up there tomorrow. If he calls tomorrow night, which he probably won’t, Mary will stall him and call the boat; she has three-way calling, so we can make it sound like I’m still here. How’s that sound?”

  “Complicated. Why don’t you just come back here tonight.”

  “Hooker that bad off, hunh?”

  “He might not be the only one, but there’s all that goddamn whistling …”

  “Well I do really have some shopping to do; maybe I’ll buy some interesting outfits and we can see how Hooker likes them. Besides, Mary wants to visit. She wants to hear all about you. Aren’t you proud?”

  “Everybody’s right; I don’t understand women,” he sighed. “But half a weekend is better than no weekend. I’ve got lots to tell you.”

  “You mean we’ll have time to talk?” she asked, that teasing tone returning. “Mary thinks we won’t. Isn’t she awful? So, I’ll see you sometime tomorrow afternoon. You have all the beach bunnies off the boat by the time I get there.”

  “All of them?” he complained. “That’s going to affect my reputation, you know.”

  “Yes, but it’ll do wonders for mine. Bye!”

  Mike hung up. Hooker, who had gone silent under his cover during the conversation, resumed whistling. Mike yelled at him to shut up, but Hooker ignored him. Mike went back to his book. She had sounded like a schoolgirl, teasing, flirting, and one hundred percent into her little conspiracy. And happy. He wondered not for the first time what the hell he had gotten himself into, but was feeling fewer regrets all the time.

  The submarine intruded into his thoughts. He wondered again if it could all be true. And if it is true, what the hell am I doing here reading a book and making plans for the weekend. Up to now, it had all been hypothetical, an interesting theory with enough questions and ambiguity to make it implausible. If it’s implausible, we can toy with it. But Coral Sea was coming back. Next week, maybe. Coral Sea provided several new elements: the target, the motive, and the consequences. And then it might not stay hypothetical or implausible. It could get real in a heartbeat, real in the worst way, with smashed ships and hundreds of casualties spilling into a stunned sea on a late Friday afternoon. He stared out the porthole at the darkened marina. What should he be doing now, if some bastard is really out there?

  FIFTY

  The Mayport Marina, Saturday, 3 May

  Mike spent the next morning doing boat chores and cleaning house after a week of domestic neglect. Hooker had begun the day with another siege of whistling, but Mike had turned the vacuum cleaner exhaust on him. The mini-hurricane that followed required the bedraggled parrot
to spend the rest of the morning settling all the severely ruffled feathers, effectively shutting him up. Mike’s thoughts strayed continuously to Diane’s impending arrival, until he remembered that the Exec was coming out to the boat that afternoon.

  He paused to work it out. Orlando was about three, four hours from Mayport. If she went shopping until midday, then had lunch with her friend, and then drove up, it would be about four, five o’clock before she arrived. But maybe earlier. He’d better go see Max.

  He found the Marina owner up at the front office, explaining the joys of boat ownership to a pair of urban sophisticates. Maxie was being polite, but his hackles were up just a little. Mike watched in amusement as the two explored every nuance of the marina lifestyle. One of them began giving Mike the eye behind his friend’s back, so Mike wandered out to the back pier porch until they were through. Maxie joined him in a few minutes.

  “Just what we freaking need,” he growled. “Some more girls.”

  Mike laughed out loud, and then told Max he had a problem.

  “Yeah, what?” said Max, giving him the look. “You’ve invited two women down for the same weekend, am I right? And you want old Max here to shunt one of ’em off.”

  Max was older than Mike, but still reputed to be quite active amongst the local ladies.

  Mike laughed. “Not quite, but it is something like that; I’ve got one woman coming down for the weekend, but I’ve also got my XO coming out here for some business. I’ve got to make sure she doesn’t come tripping aboard while he’s still there.”

  “This that tall brunette I been seein’? She’s too good lookin’ to be single, which means you’re doin’ somethin’ really dumb, and I ain’t gonna get involved in somethin’ that produces husbands showing up in the office with shotguns lookin’ for wayward women, unh-unh!”

  Mike explained the situation about the husband and his girlfriend, and how it was a Navy triangle, so to speak. Max, who genuinely liked Mike, shook his head in wonder.

  “You like livin’ dangerously? Is that it? You bored with no war on?”